Yet the news of the engagement--he wished he could have had it from Harry's own lips--cut clean across his personal preoccupations. How right! How splendid! Dear old Harry! And how he would like to congratulate Miss Vivien! All that on Saturday afternoon or Sunday. Andy was one of the world's toilers; for them works of charity, friendship, and love have for the most part to wait for Saturday afternoon or Sunday; the other five days and a half--it's the struggle for life, grimly individual. He loved Harry Belfield, and stored up untold enthusiasm for Saturday afternoon or Sunday--those altruistic hours when we have time to consider our own souls and other people's fortunes. But to-day was only Thursday; Thursday is well in the zone of the struggle. Andy's timber business was--just turning the corner! So many businesses always are. Shops expensively installed, hotels over-built, newspapers--above all, newspapers--started with a mighty flourish of heavy dividends combined with national regeneration--they are all so often just turning the corner. The phrase signifies that you hope you are going to lose next year rather less than you lost last year. If somebody will go on supplying the deficit--in that sanguine spirit which is the strength of a commercial nation--or can succeed in inducing others to supply it in a similar spirit, the corner may in the end be turned. If not, you stay this side of the magical corner of success, and presently find yourself in another--to be described as "tight." A life-long experience of questions--of problems and riddles--was not, for Andy Hayes, to stop short at the felicitous solution of the puzzle about Jack Rock's butcher's shop in Meriton High Street. Andy had to postpone reflection on Harry Belfield's happiness and Vivien's emancipation. Yet he had a passing appreciation of the end of ordeals--of Curly, cross-country rides, and the like. Would the mail from Montreal bring a remittance for the rent of the London office? The other business men in the fast morning train were grumpy. Money was tight, the bank rate stiff, times bad. No moment to launch out! There were sounded all the familiar jeremiads of the City train. What could you expect with a Liberal Government in office? The stars in their courses fought against business. Nobody would trust anybody. It was not that nobody had the money--nobody ever has--but hardly anybody was believed to be able, in the last resort, to get it. That impression spells collapse. The men in the first-class carriage--Andy had decided that it was on the whole "good business" to stand himself a first-class "season"--seemed well-fed, affluent, possessed of good cigars; yet they were profoundly depressed, anticipative of little less than imminent starvation. One of them explicitly declared his envy of a platelayer whom the train passed on the line.